Unpacking Unconscious Bias: Its Not What You Think
When a friend — I’ll call her Marilyn — asked for my “best psychotherapist take” on how to tell her 9-year old daughter they could not keep the stray kitten they’d discovered in a ditch near their home, I was ready with offers born of many years of experience on topics like this. Not a good time for the family to add a new member, or incur the expenses of a pet? An opportunity to teach a child about boundaries and limits in life. Worried the child will not do her part to care for the kitten? Consider this an opportunity to teach about accountability. Lay out the new responsibilities leveraged against a set of rewards for meeting them.
“Its not that,” said Marilyn. “I just hate cats. I don’t even get why people want pets.”
This took straight aim at my assumptions. I am not only pro-pet, I am very definitely pro-cat. My desire to be continue to be pro-Marilyn, a person I respect and care about, propelled a friendly grilling about what I considered her “problem with cats.” A cat-associated trauma of some kind? Something about their disposition?
“I can’t give a reason,” she said, after a long pause. “I really don’t know why I’m saying no to this.” Still anti-cat, she agreed that it was pro-parent for her to think about it for a week before making a decision with emotional weight for her daughter.
“My sisters hate cats, and my parents hate cats.” she reported back. “We have no idea why. We never had one. Because we don’t like them, I guess.” An unconscious bias. With no direct experience of her own to draw on that would justify her anti-cat attitude, Marilyn was willing to reconsider, much to the delight of her (very responsible) 9-year old. And I recognized I had my own presumptions about what a cat-focused parenting dilemma might involve.
When it comes to unconscious bias, we simply do not know what we are missing. We all make cognitive judgements that occur in an instant, driven by a worldview or embedded assumptions below conscious awareness. Witness the present cultural moment. “Stay-at-home” and “wear-a-mask” orders to stop the spread of the corona virus, or heightened focus on the realities of structural racism, evoke strong reactions ranging from passionate support to anxiety to rank hostility.
“When faced with something that challenges our assumptions or feels like a threat to our beliefs, we react, and it has impact,” says Ellen Feldman Ornato, co-founder, with Jenny Drescher, of The Bolder Company, which offers experiential, improvisation-based training on topics related to effective behavior change. Underlying beliefs surface as powerful waves of emotion, and when those feelings are negativity, fear or shame they interfere with the ability to process, or even accept, new information. “But we can learn to make a distinction between reacting and responding, to notice that we are having an emotional reaction at the moment we are having it. And pause. In that pause — when we can become aware of the filters through which we perceive things — is the space for change.”
Unconscious bias is a feature of the human mind’s capacity to rapidly find a frame for experiences that are constantly unfolding, a kind of mental shorthand. “How we walk through the world every day is the manifestation of our unconscious biases,” states Drescher. “The whole spectrum of responses are present in our world, based on how we are doing on any given day.” Recognizing the intersectionality between unconscious bias and emotional intelligence, their work uses fun, fascinating Applied Improvisation exercises that tap thoughts along with feelings, combine the serious with the playful, which helps trainees put self-judgement to the side while exploring aspects of self that might otherwise trigger defensiveness.
“Emotional Intelligence is the ability to manage emotions, use emotional information, relate to other people and influence others,” explain Ornato and Drescher. “We use improv exercises to have people experience and practice these competencies, and doing them brings people into the present moment. We then have an opportunity to reflect, and examine our responses in a supportive way. We become more conscious.”
Unconscious bias shapes the way we treat people and influences perception of how others treat us. “If we don’t reinforce that people need — and want — to overcome their biases, we end up silently condoning the status quo,” write Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg in The New York Times. In work with complex, multi-layered organizations, The Bolder Company will bring employees from all levels together for diversity training. “We will have everyone from the short-order cook to the post-doc interns in the same class together, learning the same information. They are filtering it through very different systems and backgrounds. For some it’s the very first time they’ve had any level of diversity training, for others it’s a refresher and a repositioning for them.”
Research published in the journal NeuroImage shows that improvisation — with its emphasis on interpersonal connection and coordinated action — is uniquely effective for crafting this kind of shared learning experience. And there is tremendous value in the group approach. “A common individual bias is valuing one’s own personal experience over relevant organizational data or scientific findings,” writes Carnegie Mellon researcher Denise Rousseau in Organizational Dynamics. “People typically use less objective information in making individual decisions than they think they do and base many judgments on unquestioned personal beliefs and assumptions. The manager who favors candidates who went to the same university may not recognize the reason for his preference. However, making the hiring decision in a group using de-biasing practices can surface and overcome that manager’s biased assumptions.”
The Bolder Company offers a deep-dive into self-awareness in their work using The EQ-i 2.0® (Emotional Quotient Assessment. “This is a psycho-metric instrument — the only one of its kind that is regulated by the American Psychological Association— that explores the ways this knowledge is actionable,” say Drescher and Ornato. “It measures competencies such as empathy, social responsibility, and self-awareness; behaviors that directly impact an individual’s ability to make active choices that impact unconscious bias. Because the assessment is granular, it is actionable.”
Applied Improvisation has an immediacy of action and interaction that focuses attention on the here-and-now and supports shared reflection on inner awareness. This kind of social-emotional experience promotes development of what Ornato and Drescher refer to as “buildable skills.” Some of these include:
Mental and Emotional Flexibility: Improvisation skills include close listening and fluid responsiveness to what others say and do. This translates into real-life abilities for greater understanding of others’ perspectives and capacity to negotiate over perceived barriers. Recent research published in Human Resource Managament Review describes improvisation as a vital approach to mental and emotional agility. “This is an essential skill for everything we are going through right now,” state Ornato and Drescher, “when its fair to say all of our assumptions are being upended.”
Learning to pause between stimulus and response. Reactive behaviors are one of the drivers of rigid systems that are resistant to change. When we are in high-tension situations where the threat level is high — the way many people are feeling right now — the stress response narrows the field of awareness and reduces the range of choices we are able to notice. Improv exercises used in Bolder Company sessions are designed to make shifts into a more purposeful and positive mindset not only possible, but enjoyable. “The pause gives us time to know why we are reacting the way we are reacting and make a conscious, active choice,” explains Ornato.
When we are reactive, we are acting from a belief system that may not actually serve us. Unconscious bias can express as a sense of threat or negativity — or safety and positivity — about a person, situation, idea or concept that we cannot rationally explain. But what is learned can be unlearned, and replaced with buildable skills that take both thinking and action in new directions.
Back to cats and my friend, Marilyn. Change is possible. She stumbled into a whole new awareness about herself by examining her unconscious bias, which as it turns out is like most of the biases we have. She learned it from people she loved and never reality tested it. So, what’s it like to live with — and, as it turns out, love — a cat? Well, it’s not what she’d thought.
